Grey Area (6 page)

‘Pissed already, are they?’ said June as Giselle came into the kitchen. ‘I know it’s only eight but once you get Peter and Henry together there’s no stopping them, is there, Caitlin?’ Giselle saw that there was another woman in the kitchen. She was middle-aged but with the figure of a gamine. She had pretty little features and an uncomfortably sharp, trowel-like chin. Giselle proffered her hand.

‘Hi, I’m Giselle Dawson.’

‘And I’m Caitlin Beckwood – and that’s the only straight statement you’re likely to get out of me all evening. June, d’you have a corkscrew, I’m sure Giselle is dying for a glass of wine, I know I am.’

Dinner was accorded a great success.

A success as far as the two couples were concerned, perhaps, but Giselle felt distinctly sidelined. The older people took one end of the table and the twins consorted at the other. Giselle was stuck in the middle, faced with either having to force herself into the grown-ups’ conversation, which was raucous and full of shared allusions, references to a communal history, or else relapse into her teens and the kind of join-the-dots self-assertion and clumsily plotted intimacy that was still all too fresh from her days as an undergraduate.

She got up after courses to help June and the twins with the clearing, but each time she was shooed back down into her seat. Not even this form of ordinary intercourse was allowed her.

It wasn’t anything intentional on anyone’s part – she knew that. It was just that the two older women had a lot to talk about – and so it seemed did the men. As for the twins, their communication consisted almost entirely of near-telepathic nods and lid dips, betokening leisured centres of self but thinly partitioned-off from one another.

Giselle was struck by the way that neither of the men offered to assist in any way. Caitlin Beckwood had got up to do a late whip of the syllabub because she was ‘good at that sort of thing’, but the only contribution Peter made throughout the evening was to open bottle after bottle of the caustic Burgundy, and the only contribution Henry made was to drink them. By the time the cheese board was passed round, the plot of the table that lay between them had been over-developed with empty bottles. They stood about like glass missile silos that had already shot their wad.

The wine had got to Peter and Henry’s faces. It was particularly remarkable in Peter’s case, because he was wearing an intense, burgundy-coloured smoking jacket with quilted lapels. His white shirt was a wedge of light between the two blobs of vinous darkness.

It looked ridiculous, this posh bit of plush cast over his teddy-bear torso, and Peter seemed to regard it accordingly as a joke prop, occasionally flicking invisible particles of dust from the cuffs, as if punctuating his interminable philosophical wrangles with Henry by alluding to the insubstantiality of matter itself.

Throughout dinner, and even when they moved next door to have coffee and After Eights, they had talked Free Will. This was capitalised – in Giselle’s mind – because so intense were their clashes that they might have been arguing the tactics relating to some Amnesty International campaign to liberate a freedom fighter of that name.

‘Look, Henry.’ Peter plunked the table with outspread pudgy fingers. ‘It doesn’t matter at what point you introduce indeterminacy into the material world, that isn’t the issue. The impossibility of free will rests on a misconception of what it is to be truly free; and indeed, the irony of the great superstructure of argument that has been built on top of this category error is that it – in and of itself – represents the very acting-out of unfreedom – ‘

‘Bollocks,’ Henry countered expertly. ‘Total crap. You go round and around, Peter, up and down the rhetorical escalator like a child, but really your arguments are a naive outgrowth of adolescent cynicism. Your refusal to face up to the freedom of the will is a wish to avoid full moral responsibility – ‘

‘For Christ’s sake, Henry, give it a bloody rest.’

And so they went on. To begin with Giselle had listened to the argument with close attention. Her eyes flicked over the net of Burgundy bottles, from player to player, as they volleyed rubberised sophistries back and forth, struggling to win the
bon point.
Eventually she grew weary.

The paradox that it was Beckwood, the polymer scientist working with the testable proofs of science, who clung on to the moral essence of free will, wasn’t lost on her. And although she was disappointed by Peter’s unwillingness to include her in the debate – apart from an occasional ‘Giselle will back this up, she’s a philosopher too, y’know’ – she couldn’t help being thrilled once more, as she had been in his seminars, by the audacity of his pronouncements, the sure rigidity of his mental projections.

Peter kept on creating truth tables to illustrate his more technical points. At the dinner table these were constructed from rolled-up pellets of bread, lain out on the mahogany surface like edible Go counters. From time to time, Caitlin and June broke off from their intimate conversation to say things like, ‘Really, Peter, playing with your food like an infant, is this what you do at High Table . . .’

Giselle was amazed by how dismissive the women were of their menfolk. They either ignored them, or joshed them unmercifully. Their remarks betrayed such condescension, such refusal to admit any equality with Peter and Henry, that she was surprised that the men didn’t retaliate in any way. But perhaps they were simply too drunk.

‘That’s what Jowett used to say.’ They were in the drawing room and Henry and Peter were drinking Rémy Martin out of mismatched tumblers. ‘Are you a two-bottle man, or a three-bottle man!’ They guffawed at this.

‘Joyce doesn’t realise what she’s putting up with,’ Caitlin was saying to June. ‘If she did, she wouldn’t allow them to bully her in this fashion.’ It had transpired that Caitlin was a landscape gardener as well – and a successful one. Giselle could work this out from the famous names that were inadvertently kicked between them as they discussed ideas, billings, possible commissions, the impossibility of getting good workers.

Giselle had had more wine that she should. She was almost drunk. When she turned her head, from the bookcase to the men’s mulberry faces, from these faces to those of the animated women, her eyes followed on lazily, lurching against the insides of their sockets as if intoxicated in their own right.

The voices burred and lowed. Giselle tried to imagine her hosts as cattle. They fitted the role well, set down on the field of carpet by the pools of wavering light, grazing on conversation.

‘You look ready to drop, Giselle.’ It was June, her voice maternal, gently concerned.

‘I’m, I’m sorry . . .?’

‘You’d better go up to bed, my dear, you’ll need a good night if you’re going to cope with Peter and his hangover in the morning.’

‘Oh, yeah, urn, s’pose so.’ Giselle struggled to her feet, the distance from the bottom of the low armchair to being upright was an Everest ascent.

She said her good-nights. Peter and Henry barely interrupted their conversation, they just waved their glasses at her and made valedictory noises. The women were more polite.

‘I do hope you’ll be all right in the Rood Room,’ said June. ‘It can be a bit draughty.’

‘Oh I’m sure I will; please don’t worry.’

As she tunnelled her way up through the house Giselle felt nothing but relief – relief to have escaped the adults. Even though she was going to bed, she might have been on her way to join the twins, who she could hear chattering and playing records in some mid-distanced room. But what Giselle really wanted was sleep. Sleep and dreams.

In the Rood Room she felt her way gingerly around the shoulder-high screen and across the warped floorboards to the bed. She snapped on the bedside lamp and in that instant the whole space was defined with startling clarity, the Grunters jumbled together in jangling copulation on the screen, its penile coping writhing in the shadows, the plaster reliefs giving a serried leer.

Giselle sat down heavily on the bed and absorbed the charge gathered in the room, the accumulated gasps of time. They bounced off the walls and came into her, nuzzling down into the warm pit off her lower belly. Giselle was shocked by the feeling – the immediacy of her lust. The Rood Room seemed to hold her like a lover, cupping her body within its own warm confines.

Giselle had never had any real difficulties with sex. She had moved from riding ponies and horses to riding men and boys easefully, just going up on her sensual stirrups to absorb the shift from a merely physical trot to a psychic canter. But while she could will herself to climax, power herself up on to some kind of free-floating plateau, she knew that the constrictions of her upbringing still remained. Some way inside her, like a twist in a party balloon, they strangled abandon, choked off the flow of desire.

If only someone like Peter Geddes – not Geddes himself, of course – but someone like him, someone who plaited the psychic with the physical into a rigid rope, could pull himself into her. Here, in the Rood Room, her orange candle lit and pulsing soft light over the curved ceiling, Giselle could dare to imagine such a possibility – it coming and lancing into her, a naked libertine will, imploding from the noumenal realm into the phenomenal body of her world.

Outside the night insects scratched their legs, as Giselle caressed her own. She ran her palms up from her knees, snagging and then furling back the material of her skirt, conscious of it as a curtain being raised on a living puppet show; her hands – the players – descended from the boards of her belly to the pit of lust.

Her fingernails snagged at the rubber-band waist of her tights. She peeled them off, together with her pants. The warm coil was dropped by the side of the bed. It was the same with her blouse and her bra. She removed them with the hands of another person. It was the hands that made love to her, the hands that grasped her buttocks and pitched Giselle’s body back against the headboard. They whooshed around her breasts, pulling the nipples out to precise points of sensation. They moulded her body with worshipful art, as if it were a wet gobbet of clay being shaped into a votary statue of a fertility goddess.

From the other time of the twins’ room, Giselle could faintly hear and dimly recognise the chanting of a current hit: ‘Doo-wa yi, yi, yi, dooo-waaa. Yeah-yeah, mm-m-, yeah-yeah.’ The painted Grunters flexed their Hanna-Barbera bodies in time to the music, while the foreign fingers – wet now with a gastronome’s delight – picked at tit-bits of Giselle.

When she came it was with a hot flush. So much so, that as she lay on the disordered bed Giselle could almost imagine that she saw steam rising from the juncture of her thighs.

Downstairs Peter Geddes was pissed. The Beckwoods had long gone, and with them the necessity for the propriety performance that masks unhappiness for the well-bred English family.

June and Peter had reverted to their intimate selves, their rude selves, their hateful and hating selves. The fresh start they had made that morning, the honest attempt to use happy memories as scaffolding for a brave new marital building, had subsided into the churned-up mud of the present.

June was in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher when Peter’s pencilled doodles on the table caught her eye. She went over and peered down at them. This is what she saw:

She wiped it out with a sweep of her damp J-cloth, and called into the next room, ‘You’re not free any more, Peter!’

‘Whassat?’ His burning brow poked round the doorjamb.

‘You’re not free any more.’

‘Whyssat?’ he slurred.

‘Because I’ve obliterated your stupid truth table. You’re always saying that the truth about the world is a revealed thing. Well now it’s unrevealed. In fact, it’s gone altogether.’ She was at the sink. Scraping filaments of veal from the dinner plates with horrid knife squeals.

‘Oh no, June, you shouldn’t have done that, really you shouldn’t . . .’ Peter was genuinely distressed. He staggered across to the table. In the overhead lighting of the kitchen his drunkenness was even more apparent. ‘June, June . . . That was the matrix, the functional cradle that contains us both. Now it’s gone . . . Well, I don’t know, I just don’t know . . .’ and in concerto with his voice trailing away, his pudgy finger trailed across the damp surface. He raised it up to his brimming eyes and contemplated the greyish stain on its pad – all that was left of his freedom.

June slammed the door of the dishwasher. She was, Peter reflected with the hackneyed heaviness of the drunk, even more beautiful when she was angry. ‘Right! That’s it. I’m not going to listen to this maudlin drivel all night, I’m going to bed. I would suggest you do the same instead of sitting downstairs until 5 a. m., the way you did when Henry and Caitlin last came over. Honestly, chucking back brandy and listening over and over to the Siegfried Idyll.

‘Half of your waking life you seem to think that you’re wearing a horned helmet and sitting with the gods in Valhalla, not sporting a greasy mop of thinning hair and drunkenly slumped in your family-fucking-home in Notting-bloody-hamshire.’ With that she departed, stamping up the stairs.

For a couple of minutes after she had left the kitchen Peter did nothing. He just swayed back and forth, listening to the gurgling of alcohol in his brain, heavy oil slopping in a rusty sump. Then he summoned himself and dabbing at the light switch with his numb hand managed to kill the lights. He went next door to the sitting room and with great deliberation turned on the record player, selected an album from the old-fashioned free-standing rack that stood by it, and put it on.

As Wagner’s billowing orchestration filled the room, Peter subsided into an armchair. He spilt a few measures of brandy on to his trousers, but three more managed to hit the tumbler. These he chucked down. The music swelled to fill the space, lowering like a heliotrope grizzly bear. Peter poured himself another brandy, then another and then a fourth.